As a guitar teacher I have often wondered how to help my students learn scales and chords. I like to make lessons fun, and yet learning scales and chords traditionally has required pages and pages of charts for all scale positions and chords.
Finally I stumbled upon a sliding scale and chord finder that was simple and fun to use. I based the design on what has worked for my students over many years. This included learning a few basic chord shapes and then simple modifications or additions to create all other chords. For example I would teach a D major chord shape and then show students how to modify this shape by adding or moving fingers to find D7, D minor, Dsus4, Dsus2, Dm7, D9. So from one chord they learnt how to construct many. I found that this accelerated their learning and also meant that if they forgot chords they could build them from the basic principles I had established.
The same approach also worked for Blues (Pentatonic) scales, and with a sliding scale finder, my students could see how the basic scale patterns moved as we changed keys. They also could see how the Major and Minor Blues patterns were clearly related. All in all this meant that learning and understanding scales was suddenly much much simpler. My students were happier and so was I, because that meant we could get on with the more enjoyable process of plays songs and improvising great guitar solos.
In both of the designs for scales and chords I also incorporated colours and numbers which highlighted exactly what was happening. In the case of Blues scales it showed my students which notes were the same on different parts of the fretboard and also which notes to bend for greater effect. I discovered as a byproduct an interesting fact that there were only two basic 5-note patterns that had to be remembered in order to construct all Blues scales on the guitar. By helping my students it now makes it much easier for me as well.
